Munich offered refuge back then, in September 1976, in one of the darkest hours in the life of Ingmar Bergman, the great, celebrated film and theater director. On January 30, during a rehearsal for Strindberg’s “Totentanz” in the Dramatenhaus in Stockholm, he was taken off the stage and taken to the police headquarters – a deliberately harassing action, it was about an investigation into tax evasion. It was a scandal that was widely played out in the press and sent the sensitive, tormented Bergman into a nervous breakdown. The tax investigator Kent Karlsson acted particularly nasty: “When I asked him what he was actually getting at, he said he was holding my film persona for a ‘nullity’ that needs to be eliminated.” The rescue came from the artistic director Kurt Meisel, who brought Bergman to Munich in September to produce at the Residenztheater.
Bergman tells of this phase of his life in his work diaries, where he notes his physical and emotional state with radical, sometimes almost masochistic frankness, reports on his projects, sketches first screenplay ideas, or even entire scenes and dialogues: a very unique mixture of intimate diary and impulsive work journal. A selection has now been published in German by Berenberg Verlag under the title “I write films”, selected and transmitted by Renate Bleibtreu. She will present the volume on Monday, February 21st, in the Literaturhaus, together with the actress Rita Russek, who was working with Bergman in Munich at the time. Markus Aicher from BR. After the conversation there is the film “From the Life of Marionettes”, which Bergman shot in Munich, with Robert Atzorn, Gaby Dohm and Rita Russek.
The Munich audience reacts reservedly
Bergman’s reaction to the shock of the arrest and the cynicism of the tax inspector Karlsson was hurt and regressive, pleading for the artist to rest and retreat: “If I could wish for one thing, it would be this: let me do my writing, my films and my theater performances, while I still can, but free me from my possessions. Take care of the house, apartments, company, productions, finished products, machines, offices and things, things, things that almost suffocate me.” There was no absolute liberation in Munich either, the audience and critics were rather reserved towards the star director. In the Bavaria studios he shot “Das Schlangenei” for the producer Dino de Laurentiis. He was in conversation with the Edgar Wallace and Karl May producer Horst Wendlandt about another film, “Love without a Lover”, about which he writes a lot in the work diaries: Exile made the film radical and aggressive is supposed to take place in cold Munich, a grim picture of modern, degenerate society, in which prostitution and narcissism, terrorism and Nazism dominate: “Somehow everything comes to a head and ends in a crazy bloodbath … Beneath the new, elegant Munich lie the dead of the bombing raids.” Nothing became of the film, but a lot of it went into “From the Life of the Puppets”. And you can feel an unbelievable inner turmoil in this exciting book, which alternates between the clinical and the comic: “My most secret wish, to be still or dead, is terrible and must be fought at all costs.”
“I write films” – Ingmar Bergman’s work diaries, Literaturhaus, February 21, 7 p.m., an evening with Renate Bleibtreu and Rita Russek, in the hall and via stream, tickets below www.literaturhaus-muenchen.de